News 05.04.19 : Today’s Articles of Interest from Around the Internets

Are the Hyper-Specialist Shops of Berlin the Future of Retail?

On the first floor of a nondescript 1,000 sq metre industrial unit in Berlin’s Steglitz district, four workers are cautiously placing pregnant queen ants into test tubes in order to dispatch them across Europe. This is Antstore, the world’s first specialist ant shop, a business with around two dozen employees, a glass-cutting workshop, plastic and plaster modelling studios and a full-time social media manager.

It is just one of the surprisingly large number of shops in Berlin that sell only one thing, be it crawly insects, salty sweets, sticky tape or miniature string instruments. With online retail sales changing the face of high streets in cities around the world, many wonder if this hyper-specialisation could be more than an accidental side effect of the German capital’s tumultuous history, and also a blueprint for the high street of the future.

In Conversation: Anjelica Huston

Anjelica Huston admits that her latest film, John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum, is not in her favorite genre. “I don’t like violent movies,” she says. “But I like this movie.” Huston plays a small but memorable role as the Director, a heavily bejeweled Russian ballet instructor and one of only a handful of humans to appear onscreen who are not immediately stabbed, shot, impaled, julienned, or otherwise ingeniously killed by Keanu Reeves’s titular bounty hunter. All things considered, it’s a perfect role for her — dignified enough for a 67-year-old Oscar winner and trustee of a four-generation show-business dynasty, and, given all the potential sequels, a nice break for an actress who still needs to work for a living, as Huston says she does. John Wick may be ultraviolent, yet it’s a franchise made for dog lovers. “This is a movie about a guy who’s basically avenging the death of his puppy,” she says. “Jesus, I’m passionate about dogs. It’s a huge thing.” She has three that she dotes on as well as a sheep, 13 goats, and five horses residing at the ranch she’s owned for 35 years in the foothills of California’s Sequoia National Forest. I meet Huston — in jeans, a crisp, starched white blouse, and a chunky tinted pair of Persols — for a three-hour lunch at Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica, ten minutes from her Pacific Palisades home.

What John Singleton Accomplished With ‘Boyz N the Hood’

“Boyz N the Hood” was John Singleton’s debut film. It came out in 1991 when he was just 23 years old. The director, who died yesterday at the age of 51 after suffering a stroke, went on to make several great films but none rival his first, one of the seminal films of its era.

In many ways it’s the basic American teenage coming-of-age story that we know well from movies like “Risky Business” and “The Breakfast Club.” Can our heroes navigate the last year of high school and make it to college? A large part of “Boyz” is about the efforts of the main character, Cuba Gooding Jr.’s Tre Styles, to lose his virginity, and the efforts of his best friend, Morris Chestnut’s Ricky Baker, to do well on the SAT and get into the University of Southern California.

They must do this while also surviving one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the country — South Central Los Angeles, which the film depicts as a place where violence is ubiquitous, police helicopters hang overhead, almost everyone owns a gun, and Crips prowl the streets day and night just looking for someone to kill. It’s as if the sweet, internal exploration of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and all those big questions about Who am I becoming? were taking place in the middle of “The Hunger Games.”

What South Africa Can Teach Us
As Worldwide Inequality Grows

Even for the Western Cape, a province known for its stunning vistas, the view from the settlement of Imizamo Yethu is extraordinary. A panorama of rolling hills, sand dunes and stone cliffs unfurls to the sea. To one side is a fishing village that has gentrified into quaint cafés and handicraft shops; on the other are stately mansions, horse paddocks and the expansive campus of a prestigious private school.

The view of Imizamo Yethu from the suburb below, Hout Bay, is also extraordinary, if for different reasons. This ramshackle settlement clinging to a rock escarpment is made up of small brick houses, corrugated-aluminum shacks and lean-tos constructed from old shipping pallets. The few paved roads intersect with a network of mud paths that reek of raw sewage in the summer heat, and flood under winter rains. More than 6,000 black families live in this area, which is about the size of a suburban American shopping mall. Hout Bay, which is about 50 times larger and mostly white, has roughly the same number of residents. Violence in Imizamo Yethu is rife; in April, five people were killed in a shoot-out between rival transport cartels that run the minibus networks linking the settlement to central Cape Town, 12 miles away.

A few days after the minibus shootings, Kenny Tokwe, a community organizer who has been living in Imizamo Yethu for nearly 30 years, looks down on Hout Bay’s idyllic expanse. It’s been 25 years since South Africa’s first multi-racial democratic elections, held on April 27, 1994, were supposed to bring an end to the institutionalized racial segregation of the apartheid regime. But little has changed, says Tokwe. “South Africa is still a country of two nations: the rich whites”—he points down the hill—“and the poor blacks.” With a chuckle, he points at himself, an educated black man who spent his youth campaigning for equal rights for South African blacks only to find himself, at 58, fighting for them to have basic standards of living.

My Childhood in a Cult

“Where are you from?” For most people, this is a casual social question. For me, it’s an exceptionally loaded one, and demands either a lie or my glossing over facts, because the real answer goes something like this: “I grew up on compounds in Kansas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Martha’s Vineyard, often travelling in five-vehicle caravans across the country from one location to the next. My reality included LSD, government cheese, and a repurposed school bus with the words ‘Venus or Bust’ painted on both sides.” And that, while completely factual, is hard to believe, and sounds like a cry for attention. So I usually just say, “Upstate New York.”

Let me elaborate. I was born into a family of a hundred adults and sixty children in 1968, and spent the first eleven years of my life among them. The Lyman Family, as it was called, referred to itself in the plural as “the communities.” It was an insular existence. I had no contact with anybody outside the Family; my whole world was inhabited by people I had always known. I was homeschooled and never saw a doctor. (Only the direst circumstances called for medical professionals: fingers cut off while we kids were chopping wood, or a young body scalded by boiling water during the sorghum harvest.)

I was also raised to believe that we were eventually going to live on Venus. In my early twenties, years after I left the Family, I was describing my childhood to someone and she said, “That doesn’t sound like a commune—it sounds like a cult.” I still balk at this word and all the preconceived notions that come with it. What’s the difference between a commune and a cult? Here’s one: a cult never calls itself a cult. It’s a term created by people not in cults to label and classify groups they view to be extreme or dangerous. So it feels judgmental, presumptuous, and narrow in scope. It makes me feel protective of my upbringing. You don’t know how it was.

But in time I’ve had to consider some irrefutable truths. I grew up under the reign of a charismatic, complicated leader named Mel Lyman, who was constantly issuing new rules for living. True, Lyman never ordered his followers to kill anyone, the way Charles Manson did. But, if Lyman had asked, I’m pretty sure that they would have complied. In 1973, three members of the Lyman Family attempted to rob a bank; one of them was killed, and the other two went to prison. Also, Mel Lyman wrote a book called “Autobiography of a World Savior.”